Hi everyone, I'm a User Experience Designer (front-end website design, apps, making sure stuff is easy to use on phones and computers).
I started to wake up when I worked in Politics for a short stint. Part of the job was having to retype a 350 page book into a digital format on How to Win Elections. It was a real eye-opener, but I figured it was just limited to politics and got out of that field. It turned me really cynical, but also opened my eyes to end-to-end media manipulation, which is what most of the book was about.
A couple years ago, I worked at an interactive agency doing work for some big brand corporations. Needless to say, seeing some of the marketing documents was chilling. It all came to a head one day with someone sharing Katy Perry's Dark Horse music video with me and the top comment said, "Looks like Katy Perry is a victim of MK Ultra beta programming." I looked up MK Ultra online and 16 hours later, my outlook on life had changed dramatically, because instead of everything conflicting with my job and what I knew about these corporations, it all started to fall very much in line, to the point that I could predict some projects and what the marketing/design direction would be coming from the brand managers at these companies.
Right around this time, I went to a design conference where the main topic was "The Internet of Everything." It was one of the weirdest experiences of my life; speaker after speaker getting on stage talking about 10 years into the future of product design and suggesting truly Orwellian products, everything from GPS pills you swallow to putting an RFID tag on Grandpa's front door to track whether he went for a walk today and the crowd cheering and saying things like, "How can we corner this new market?" No one asking, "Is this ethical?" or "What the fuck are we doing?"
Around this same time, I learned one of my friends was a chaos magician and we started talking extensively about these topics. I tried some sigil magick about 1.5 years ago, something to the extent of "I want to be financially stable so I can quit this job and work with a clean conscious" and now here I am 2 days away from quitting my job.
The Higherside Chats has become my favorite podcasts that I listen to while doing design work and I'm kicking myself for not signing up sooner and getting the extra hour.
